1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to tools used for engineering environments and, more particularly, to a Collaborative Engineering Environment (CEE) which provides a multi-disciplinary engineering team with immediate access to all relevant product information and uses a product catalog of reusable and customizable elements available to the projects within the enterprise.
2. Background Description
Enterprise systems can include not only the systems engineering and design disciplines, but also the customer and industry program management, procurement, manufacturing, production, maintenance, user, training, and operations disciplines. Concurrent engineering teams with varying membership from these disciplines will interact with a product's information during its life cycle.
Traditional engineering approaches are based on a document-centric model of information exchange. These approaches introduce communication inefficiencies in multi-disciplinary concurrent engineering teams that are in a rapidly evolving design environment. Once a design has stabilized (into a “baseline”), inefficiencies arise from searching for the required information. Furthermore, at all times, engineers must translate information from design documentation into and out of their domain specific toolsets, introducing data translation latencies and errors and often times making incorrect or improper decisions based on out of date information. After a product has been produced, substantial information regarding design decisions is lost, introducing inefficiencies in supporting the product.
Many current commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) product data management (PDM) systems offer basic product structure management, life cycle management, document management, configuration management, workflow management and administrative capabilities required by an engineering organization. These capabilities are all supported through various underlying information models describing the product under consideration. Engineering tool interfaces are limited to computer aided design/computer aided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) tools or document file-centric interfaces such as text editors, word processors, spreadsheet tools, presentation tools, and selected external databases. Interfaces with other systems are based on interchange standards that focus on mechanical and structural aspects of the system.
Full functional web-centric PDM system products are now emerging to support widespread user access, easily managed deployment, and large scale integration of the PDM environment with other information management systems such as PDM systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, electronic commerce, and COTS PDM toolsets.
Many unique requirements associated with complex electronic systems are not supported by current COTS PDM products. Associative representations of the physical, functional, and operational information describing the complex electronic system are not supported. Related scheduling, costing and infrastructure descriptions cannot be associated, as well. Interfaces with engineering tools that create or use this information do not exist.
Available catalog functionality is limited to commercially available mechanical components typically utilized in computer-aided design (CAD) tools with the information periodically updated by a proprietary service. The ability to reflect associative physical, functional, operational, scheduling, performance, reliability, technology, costing, modeling, and other information through the catalog cannot be supported. Information from other enterprise systems such as financial systems cannot be interfaced to the catalog to be reflected in the applications referencing the catalog. Projected or “hypothetical” components are not supported by existing catalog systems.